Well, maybe.  It depends on how you set up your blog and how it is hosted.  It is often recommended that the easiest way to keep your website updated with new content is to add a blog and make frequent posts.  However, your decision on how to set it up can make a world of difference.

A question recently came up as we were reviewing statistics for a client’s website. He has a great blog that is keyword optimized and his blog posts rank very high in Google for some of his key phrases.  But it turns out that the blog isn’t hosted on his domain, but on a third party domain, so while he is getting traffic to his blog, he isn’t really building any backlinks or authority to his own site.

Here are 3 scenarios that I know of that business owners can be aware of when deciding to set up a blog.

1. The blog lives on a sub-domain of a third party, for example www.yourcompanyname.thirdpartydomain.com.  While you get the benefit of getting your posts to rank in Google by optimizing them, the weight of the overall authority and backlinks goes to the third party which can still help you indirectly, but is not your web property.
2. The blog lives on a sub-domain of your own URL, for example www.blog.yourdomain.com. Using this scenario actually doesn’t accrue authority to your domain but does accrue backlinks and authority to the blog itself which is still your own web property.
3. The blog lives on a subfolder or page on your site, for example www.yourdomain.com/blog which would then get all the accrued authority and back links to the same site.

So, it really depends on what you want to accomplish with your blog on how you set it up. Only the third scenario is going to update your primary domain with fresh content, but you may have other reasons to use one of the other scenarios.

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